Emily Chan
As a tax preparer, Pam claimed to have spent many hours dealing with the problem, filing requests for formal investigations to be launched with the police. However, their mail continued to go missing.
By the time Axton was in the eighth grade, their family had withdrawn from society. Pam had told them that they all needed to limit their interactions with the outside world to protect themselves from the perpetrator. So, they kept their curtains closed and stopped socializing with friends and neighbors.
When Axton was 19 years old, she discovered that her identity had been stolen after enrolling at Purdue University. There were pages of fraudulent activity, and the first credit card in her name had been opened when she was just 11 years old.
She went on to study identity theft, earning a master’s in consumer sciences and retailing and then getting a Ph.D in human development and family studies. She also hoped to catch the perpetrator along the way.
In 2012, she won an award for her research on childhood identity theft. A few days later, her mother was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Within six months, Pam was dead.
Two weeks after her death, Axton received an angry phone call from her father, demanding to know why she had racked up such a hefty credit card bill in 2001. The credit card statement was in her name; he had found it while going through Pam’s old paperwork.
That was when Axton realized that her mother was the one behind the identity theft. Over the next five years, she uncovered piles of paperwork her mother had hidden, including pay stubs in her mother’s maiden name, life insurance policies she had never paid the premiums on, and rejection letters for a bank account in Wisconsin.
She also read through her mother’s Facebook messages and saw that she had been creating a new series of identities.
Overall, Axton and her father calculated that Pam had defrauded them of around $600,000. Pam had even stolen money that had been set aside for Axton’s college tuition. To this day, it’s unclear what exactly Pam spent all that money on.
There are still many missing pieces to the puzzle, and Axton is determined to get to the bottom of it. Today, she is an assistant professor of consumer affairs at South Dakota State University and lives with her husband and cats.
